‘What do you mean?’
‘I suggest you follow my example and go to your woman while you can. Enjoy your time together. The child may be born any moment. The mother will need you.’
‘I don’t know if I know how to be a husband or a father.’
‘Don’t be foolish, Samuel. She loves you. You two were made for each other. Go. Be with her.’ He then turned once more to look at the sorry woman lying on the floor. ‘Goodbye, Rei. Please, let them enjoy their final moments. Put aside your petty jealousy for once in your pitiful existence. Their lives will be hard enough.’
‘But what about the Demon King?’ Samuel asked. ‘We can’t just give up. What can we do to stop him?’
‘Nothing, Samuel. Don’t even try. It will only make things worse.’ And with that, silver magic blazed around him and he arrowed away into the sky, towards the west.
The woman once called Rei climbed to her knees with her hair hanging down around her face. She sobbed wildly and crawled towards the hole in the wall.
‘Thann, my love!’ she sobbed. ‘Thann!’
During their conversation, he had time enough to reclaim much of his power, but he did not have the heart to strike such a broken woman. She already looked utterly defeated. Instead, Samuel turned away and left her to her tears.
The palace was completely abandoned and it only took a few minutes for him to reach the Koian woman’s room. The guards and wizards were gone from the halls and he easily broke down the door to her room with a spell, with a good section of the wall crumbling around it. Shara was still there at her side and Samuel rushed up beside them.
‘She’s doing well,’ the old lady said. ‘The pains have subsided. I think all the noise and ruckus outside must have scared the dear thing. You look like a new man. What was going on out there?’
‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘It is over.’
The labouring god-woman looked weary. She looked up at him with weary eyes. ‘Why won’t he come out? I’m just so tired. I need our baby to come out so I can rest.’
‘I know. It should not be long. Then you can sleep for as long as you want.’ He then turned Shara. ‘Should we move her? The palace is abandoned. We could take her down into the city? We could find somewhere safe and comfortable, and perhaps someone to help us.’
‘I don’t think it’s wise to move her, but we could use the help of a healer, just in case. And we need water and fresh towels. This is no way to have a child.’
‘Very well. I can move her,’ Samuel said and he reached carefully beneath the pregnant woman and plucked her up like a flower, sheets and all. Using his magic, she felt like little more than a pillow in his arms.
He was about to move to the door, when he felt magic building behind him. He threw up his shields, but the spell that came hurtling into the room was not meant for them. Shara screeched as the magic struck her and she burst into cinders.
‘Damn you, Magician!’ Alahativa said, holding herself against the broken doorway. She looked tragic, with her dark eye make-up streaked down her cheeks, and her hair knotted and matted about her face. ‘I will see you dead before I let you leave. At least I shall have that! You will never enjoy being with your woman! You will never feel that child in your arms!’
‘Damn you, witch!’ the Koian woman returned. ‘Why can’t you leave us in peace?’
‘Because of who I am. Because of who you are. Why should I give you peace when all you have given me is such misery? You could have done your duty and died like you were supposed to. Instead, you turned Thann against me and I will have to endure another thousand years of torment before I hold him again!’
‘That was by his own choice, not my doing,’ Samuel responded.
‘We Ancients made our choices long ago, Samuel. There is no pleasure to be had in our lives. At the very least, I will have the joy of watching you die, and seeing the misery on her face. Then, I will drive my armies for the sake of Lin, until there is nothing living upon the earth.’ She cast forth her finger and argent lightning burst forth, driving towards Samuel and deflecting from his spell shields. The stone walls blew to pieces wherever the spell flickered upon it, but Samuel and the woman in his arms remained unharmed. ‘Your magic will not last forever, Samuel. I know you are tired after facing the old magician. He was much more powerful than me, but I don’t need much power to defeat you. You can’t fight me while you hold the girl, and you can’t protect the both of you. I have you!’
A thrown clay pot landed at the Paatin Queen’s feet and she looked down instinctively. Black soot lay spilled around her feet and dark vapour curled up from it and wafted around her. Too late, she realised what it was.
‘Poison!’ she said, and she gasped, clutching at her throat and gagging. Her lightning spell ended as her attention was distracted. She staggered away from the deadly vapour and came stumbling further into the room, coughing and throwing out spells to whomever had harmed her. A length of wall collapsed and Utik’cah could be seen standing there in the hall. ‘Damn you traitor!’ she squealed. ‘What are you trying to do? Poison cannot kill me. I am your god!’ Already, she was using the power of her ring to expel the toxin from her body. It would only distract her for a few moments at best. She sent out a whip of magic and used it to drag Utik’cah near to her. ‘You will die by your own hand, traitor.’
And at once he, too, began to choke, caught in the toxic fumes that clung to her. ‘You have not saved our people, but cursed them with your evil plans,’ Utik’cah told her. ‘You brought us in from the deserts only to use us for your selfishness. You have no honour and you are not a god. You deserve to die!’
‘Shut up!’ she bellowed. She empowered her fist with magic and slammed the man down to the floor, snapping his back and leaving him writhing in pain.
Something silver glimmered in his grasp, something slender and cylindrical. Utik’cah could not speak for, even as she held him, he clutched onto the thing with both hands and looked at Samuel desperately. Samuel knew what it was and he realised Utik’cah had no idea how to use it. Within it was a hideous spell. It took an instant for Samuel to pass the man a message—a feeling of twisting planted itself in the Paatin’s mind and he knew that Utik’cah understood. He held the thing as Samuel had prescribed and readied his palms to turn it.
Samuel needed no more indication than that and threw himself out the broken window, still holding the pregnant woman in his arms. She gasped as they fell, but he would not let them be harmed. He tore his shields down and salvaged the power to cushion their blow, landing softly.
‘You can’t escape me, Samuel!’ Alahativa cried out after him, still spluttering. ‘I vow to destroy you for what you have done to me. Even if you kill me, I will be reborn. I will find all those whom you treasure and destroy their lives. Nothing you touch will ever feel happiness. I curse you as I am cursed! I curse you forever!’
Without a pause, Samuel continued vaulting away, with the Koian moaning in his arms. He cleared the city in three desperate jumps and set out into the twilight of the Star of Osirah. They landed amidst the pastures beside the gentle river, although it was now strewn with the dark shapes of floating debris and corpses. He dreaded seeing the Paatin Queen pursuing them, but he need not have feared for, in that moment, Utik’cah must have managed to twist the object in his hands. The terrible magic trapped within it was unleashed and Samuel felt the Great Spell’s wrath escape in one awful moment.
The palace vanished in a ball of white light, just as the fortress of Ghant had been destroyed, but this sphere of destruction kept growing, swallowing the city and moving out towards them with incredible speed. Samuel took another leap, bounding away with all his strength, but the wall of blinding fire was behind him. He made the first set of dunes but landed roughly. He dropped to one knee and cradled the woman in his arms as he turned his back to the blast. He threw up the strongest barrier he could muster, and held on tightly.
The wave of destruction struck and it seemed that he and the wom
an became two blended silhouettes in a world suddenly white. His shield held, but the wind and fire of the Great Spell of Destruction tore by, buffeting them wildly and singeing his cloak at the edges. He held the woman as close as he could but, as the mayhem continued, his magic began to fail. He felt his shields beginning to waiver and jets of boiling air tore about them. He searched within himself for more power, dreading what would happen to the woman in his arms if his magic failed.
The heat crept in and it felt as if it was about to engulf them, when magic came flooding into him—not from himself or any dark source, but from the woman he was protecting. She was looking at him eye to eye and pushing her own energy into him. His shields bloomed back to life and she only stopped aiding him once the decimating light had faded and the night desert was once more around them. The hills and dunes had been flattened for as far as the eye could see.
As they stood and surveyed the horizon to the east, they could see that nothing remained around the mountain but a massive column of rising smoke that rolled towards the heavens. Every house and home and structure, every wall and tower of the city, had been reduced to nothing more than charred rubble strewn across the ground.
‘Are we safe?’ she asked him, looking at the devastation with concern.
‘We are. It’s over,’ he said. ‘She’s dead.’
‘Good. Now, I’m about to have our baby. Can you get us to somewhere more appropriate?’
He nodded and, as gently as he could, he lifted her up once again and hurdled away across the desert.
CHAPTER TEN
Starfall
Samuel continued bounding across the rippled sands in the eerie silver twilight. He landed softly, cradling the woman in his arms as well as he could, before springing away again towards his goal. She kept a steady stream of energy flowing into him, keeping him going when he would otherwise have failed from weariness. It was not hard for him to pinpoint the Valley of the Ancients, for the gathering of magicians there sang to his senses. Cang’s aura alone formed a blue glow upon the horizon and Samuel kept on towards it throughout the night. What had taken them days to traverse on camelback, now took only hours as he flew above the difficult terrain on wings of magic. All the while, the Star of Osirah hung above him, with its tail spread across the heavens.
‘How much further?’ she asked, flushed in the face.
‘Not far,’ he told her. ‘Can you hold on?’
‘I think so. The pains have stopped. I think our baby does not want to be born in the desert.’
‘I will hurry.’ And with that he pushed himself on with renewed vigour, with the cold desert wind blowing in his face and setting their clothes flapping wildly around them.
‘What will we do with this child?’ she asked him.
‘Why do you ask? We will raise him together, of course.’
‘I would not ask you to stay with me if you do not love me,’ she said.
‘Of course I love you. My thoughts for you are all that have kept me from going mad. Every day of my confinement, my body was kept under the mountain, but my spirit was always with you.’
‘Was it really you I could feel?’ she asked. ‘I thought perhaps I was going mad. I heard what they did to you, and I almost died from despair.’
‘I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I fled from the pain of my body, and you kept my mind from losing its grip. I was with you, more often than you could know, and my only hope was that we could one day be together. I could not see past our differences at first, but I have come to realise it is only when I am with you that I am complete. After all our time together, it is my greatest regret that I did not realise it sooner.’
She smiled at his answer and closed her eyes. ‘I felt you with me, but I could not see you. In my dreams, I thought I could hear you screaming and, at times, I could sense your pain.’ She opened her eyes again and looked at him with worry. ‘I wanted to kill them all and come to save you, but the witch was full of lies. She said if I harmed anyone, they would kill you. I was not powerful enough to defy her. I couldn’t bring myself to even try. If not for the kindness of Sir Ferse, I don’t know how I would have survived. What became of him? Did he perish in the city?’
‘He escaped and is making his way back to his family.’
‘That is good. He missed his family as much as I missed you and every day was equal torture for him. I hope I also made his time a little more bearable—and he did teach me so much. He knows a lot about people and the ways of the world. He was very patient and understanding with me. I could feel he was troubled, but he is a good man.’
‘He is, but I am not sure how long that will last. All of us have changed in many ways. Tell me,’ he then asked her, ‘do you think we will be happy together?’
She smiled at him warmly. ‘I cannot think of anything else.’
‘Then I will help you return to your land.’
‘I do not care about going back any more,’ she told him. ‘I have learnt much of who I am and I know I am not a god—and I do not want to be one. Perhaps one day we can find a way to save my people from the Eudans, but for now, my only need is to be a mother.’
They spied the top of the Temple of Shadows, jutting above the sands, just as the sun was dawning behind him, and Samuel took one final leap into the canyon, landing lightly at the foot of the stairs that led up to the entrance.
Master Celios was waiting there at the mouth of the temple, donned in his best Order blacks with silver-hewn hems, and he beckoned to them with urgency. ‘Come! Come! We have been waiting for you all night. Come quickly! The Demon King’s return is upon us. The time is nigh.’
The Koian woman wriggled out of Samuel’s grip and she began up the stairs, holding her belly. Samuel climbed after her, but she stopped him before he could speak. ‘I want to walk a little. It will help the baby to come out. And I’m tired of being carried.’
So Samuel followed her hobbling ascent, with his hand at her back to catch her should she fall, as she took the stairs, one at a time.
‘Master Celios, how did you know we were coming?’ Samuel asked the old seer. He knew he should be angry with the man, but he could scarcely blame him for his madness. Others had compelled the unfortunate old magician to peer into the future more often than was safe, cracking his sanity in the process.
‘Cang could feel you coming,’ old Celios revealed, craning his head to look at the star above. ‘He has learned how to find you. He tried to explain it to me, but I have no mind for such talk. My mind is ever filled with the visions he asks of me.’
They advanced into the dim, adorned passageways of the temple.
‘What has happened in our absence?’ Samuel asked the old magician. ‘Something has happened to allow the demons to return. It seems the rings were not the relics we were seeking. Something else must have been responsible.’
‘Yes, yes, we know. Cang will tell you everything,’ was all Celios would say, and they followed the plodding Koian woman to the end of the hall, where she stopped in place.
She began panting quickly and bent her legs, as if looking to sit down. Samuel rushed to her side.
‘Enough walking!’ she said urgently. ‘Carry me!’
He scooped her up and started away, but Celios called them back to the opposite passage. ‘This way. We have readied a room for her this way. The others are waiting. Come.’
Samuel turned about, careful not to hit her head against the walls, for the passageways were quite tight in places. They turned a corner and went down some dusty stairs, and Samuel was surprised to find a large chamber, almost as wide as the temple itself, built beneath the temple. The great space was entirely vacant, save for a circular pattern of stones laid into the floor at its very centre. A gathering of people was waiting upon it.
Cang was foremost there, with his simple smock hanging on his skeletal frame and tied tightly around at the waist. Lomar and Eric also waited beside Balten, and they all turned to see the visitors arrive. Cang called out on si
ght of the new-comers’ approach and three Paatin women came scurrying from a side chamber and began beckoning Samuel over. He took the Koian woman past them to find a bedded room, stocked with linen and a washbasin, obviously prepared for their arrival.
‘Come, lady,’ one of the women spoke in a Paatin dialect and helped the pregnant woman from Samuel’s arms and into the bed.
No sooner had she lain back than she screamed, with her pained face turning beetroot red, and the women rushed to her side, pushing Samuel out of the way.
‘Come, Samuel,’ Balten said, waiting at the door. ‘They will care for her. We need to speak.’
Samuel reluctantly followed the man across the echoing chamber, where the others waited at its middle.
‘What happened to all the relics here? The books and shelves? The temple was full the last time I was here,’ he noted.
‘Plans have changed, Samuel,’ Balten said. ‘Everything has been carefully packed and removed, sent to other Circle hiding places around the world. The temples have always served as insurance, to pass future generations the knowledge to combat the Demon King. Now, we will not be needing it. Tonight we will achieve victory. Let Cang explain the rest.’
They reached the centre of the room and Samuel stepped up onto the raised stone circle with the others.
‘Samuel!’ Lomar said. ‘You are alive! It is good to see you.’ And he gave him a great engulfing hug. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t save them. Because of my failure, you had to endure all this time in your prison.’
‘I’m glad to see you, too,’ Samuel tried to return, but the words were lost in the crush. ‘It doesn’t matter about before. You did what you could. We are well, now.’
When Samuel could tear the man away, he saw Eric waiting beside and shook his friend’s hand warmly, and then, too, gave him a great friendly hug.
She Who Has No Name (The Legacy Trilogy) Page 54